Leave No Man Behind
by NCISfan with Tivafever
Summary: Oneshot that I just found on my computer from a few years ago. Tony muses about how the team recovered after the loss of Ziva.


**So it's been 2 years since I posted anything. Sorry for the long hiatus. :L University happened.**

 **Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS, nor the characters.**

"Tony…I-"

Not finding the words, she hugged me instead.

The embrace conveyed what she couldn't say but within seconds it was broken. The moment was too fleeting, it could never have been long enough to do justice to all the words that had remained unspoken for years.

And then she turned and was gone.

That was the last time I ever saw Ziva David.

I'd like to tell you it wasn't. In an ideal world, I'd like to tell you that she came back after her father's funeral and realised everything she had left was in the USA, here with us, her family.

I'd like to tell you that we worked at NCIS for a couple more years before I married Ziva - the love of my life, and a year later she fell pregnant with a girl, and two years later we had a baby boy, and that after many fulfilling years as NCIS agents we retired happily just outside D.C in the house we always wanted, with a garden and the white picket fence, and we grew old together, watching our children grow up and eventually watching our grandchildren play in the garden.

I'd like to tell you that story. God knows I've wished it enough times.

Gibbs, Abby, McGee, Ducky, me – we didn't realise it would end up like this. If we had, we might have never let her go.

She was only meant to be gone for 4 weeks.

Each of us talked to her by phone on a daily basis but it was barely into the second week, after Eli's funeral that we could feel the Ziva we knew starting to slip away. The strength in her voice was gradually replaced by a tone of tiredness and weariness. Soon she no longer laughed at my stories of the pranks I played on McGee or my jokes. She stopped asking about the cases that we'd solved. She stopped giving any information voluntary about herself and life in Israel. Conversations became one-sided monologues with occasional monotone one-word answers. Her passion for life seemed be diminishing by the day. When we talked about the end of her compassionate leave and her return to NCIS, she avoided the topic.

It was when she stopped calling that we started to worry. But we just assumed that it was the innumerable grief that one feels having lost a parent. It was understandable.

Then one day we discovered we couldn't call her at all. The operator said her phone number had been disconnected.

We tried everything. Vance used his connections with the Mossad to find out what happened, they told us that they couldn't locate her either. But how could we really trust them after what happened in Somalia? Abby traced Ziva's known phone numbers with no avail. McGee monitored her cards and financial records but everything had ceased. Gibbs and I went to Tel Aviv to her last known locations. It was as if Ziva David had dropped off the face off the earth.

After months of searching, her case was declared as 'Unsolved'. We were ordered to stop and to fully resume normal duties. Officially, Ziva David didn't exist anymore. Unofficially, we never gave up.

The team wasn't the same after that. It was a repeat of when we lost her to Mossad when she went on a suicide mission to Somalia. It reopened all of our fears and the wounds of the past. We retracted into the shell of our former selves.

Gibbs was the worst. I think he never recovered from this time. He had lost his second daughter.

Privately I know that each of us continue to conduct our own searches for her. We never give up hope.

I know she isn't dead. I'm sure my heart would have felt something. She just doesn't want to be found.

I'm not sure which hurts the most. The fact that she doesn't want to be part of our lives or the fact that we weren't enough for her to return to the US.

Gradually we began to function again, because you realise that there is nothing else you can do. But we aren't the same people as before. On paper, our team is the best, we solve more cases than any other. Its members are the most experience and qualified. We pass all our psych evaluations with flying colours. Paper ironically can hide a multitude of problems. In truth, our smiles never reach our eyes, our laughs are hollow and when we laugh at something, we suddenly remember and feel guilt-ridden about allowing ourselves to be happy.

Day by day we survive. But that's just it. We survive but we don't thrive.

Her desk may be occupied for now but no one can ever occupy her space in our hearts.

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